1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns a gateway connected to two data networks capable of intelligent translation between two communication protocols, at least one of the two data networks including software applications.
The invention applies in particular to translating messages between messages from a signaling network and messages from an object-oriented distributed environment, conforming to, for example, the TINA (Telecommunication Intelligent Network Architecture) specifications.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Gateways usually translate incoming messages directly into outgoing messages, i.e. the gateways do not interpret the messages in any way.
This type of gateway generally generates at least as many outgoing messages as it receives incoming messages. Given that the software applications are distributed across a network, this verbosity leads to congestion of the network and an overall reduction of system performance.
The aim of the present invention is to propose a gateway for reducing the number of outgoing messages. This reduction is achieved by delegating some of the processing effected by the applications directly to the level of the gateway.
The invention consists in a gateway between a first data network and a second data network enabling translation of messages in accordance with a first protocol specific to said first data network into messages conforming to a second protocol specific to said second data network, said second data network including software applications, and said gateway including a registration software entity, wherein messages coming from or going to a particular one of said software applications are processed by a representative software entity contained in said gateway and each new software application made available on said second data network causes the determination of said representative software entity at said registration software entity.
In a first embodiment of the invention the code of the representative software entities is transmitted to the gateway.
This can be object code that can be executed directly by the gateway.
It can instead be source code (for example Java code) that can be interpreted by the gateway, which includes the necessary interpreter (for example a Java virtual machine).
In a second embodiment the gateway has a set of representative software entities. Each new application made available then chooses one representative software entity from the set.
The sending of the code or the choice of the representative software entity can be handled by the software application itself or by an administrator.
The representative software entity can be created as and when required, i.e. each time a translation is requested.
Another embodiment entails creating the representative software entity when the software application is registered with the gateway (via the registration means). The advantage of this embodiment is that it minimizes the number of creations (and deletions) of software entities, these creations being relatively costly for a data processing system.
Other advantages and features of the invention will become more clearly apparent in the following description of an application of the invention to intelligent networks, given with reference to the accompanying drawings.